want it you must take the risk. But, my dear Alden, you will be
investing in a man's heart--which may be a fortune or a folly. Why,
I ought to have seen--and far back in my brain I did see--that the
character of Charley Steele was a type, an idiosyncrasy of modern life, a
resultant of forces all round us, and that he would demand space in which
to live and tell his story to the world. . . . And behold with what
joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above all
else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
eager inquiry and wonder and 'non possumus' with him to the end."

This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
later. The work had gone well. Week after week, month after month it
had unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease. Evidently, the
very ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find
that in this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these
words:

"A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
regard. I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place" (it was
Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), "there to live alone with Rosalie and
Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
'Harper's' again. . . . This book has been written out of something
vital in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity
that becomes one's own and part of one's self, by observation,
experience, and understanding got from dead years."